Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Repression by spoon

Champion bore Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died. They made us read his Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich when I was at school. It’s about some gloomy Russian guy in a labour camp in Siberia, who goes on and on about a spoon he hid in his boot. That’s pretty much all that happens. Our English teacher asked what the spoon represented and the class dunderhead said it symbolised the lack of cutlery under Stalin.

Few people realise this, but it's actually very hard to rise up against your oppressors with spoon alone.

It was his mastery of the distribution of spoons that aided Stalin in his tyrannical rise to power. Let us all hope we can learn from this dreadful time.